The reason you can't do what you're trying to do is that your data recovery programs require that your iPhone is visible to your operating system as a disk drive, with a drive letter.
Solution: Download

I took it earlier today. Hadn't synced yet. Yip it's my iPhone. I have recovery software. But it doesn't see the iPhone as a device. :( I saw the little twerps finger going for the big red button. Just didn't manage to stop it in time. It was a picture of a giraffe kissing my head. I hid some giraffe food on my head and had someone ready to take it. Not something I can easily reproduce.

(You don't say if you're on a Mac or PC, but there's a version for each), and use it to mount your iPHone as a drive. Then, after doing that, run your favorite file recovery tool...it should now see the iPhone as a regular drive, and run on it, the same as it would on any hard drive or USB stick, etc.

Seems like a plan, but the app keeps crashing as soon as I connect the device - on my win 7 laptop and on my XP desktop.
I have a mac at work - I can try connect it - but I don't have any mac data recovery software.
Steven

I would try it on yet another Windows-based machine, preferably one that you don't own. Perhaps there's some other software running on both your Win7 machine and your XP machine (which might not be running n other people's...) that's interfering?

Tried on another XP workstation at work.
On there the application crashes as soon as you try open it - the others only crashed when I plugged the device in.
:(
Perhaps it's time I give up - the file might even be overwritten by now with all this plugging and unplugging.
I saw a youtube clip about booting the phone into a tempory OS and pulling a disk image off it, but I don' think my recovery software will read an image - I only have a "home user" licence.
Steven

Weird, the application doesn't crash for me -- though of course that's no help to you.

I wonder if you might be able to get some support on the application from the people who make it. Perhaps they can tell you why it's crashing. It works for lots and lots of people...

Also... there shouldn't be anything to "open." That is, the way it's SUPPOSED to work is you install the application, and then it just runs in the background. After installing it, you'd go to Windows Explorer and find your iPhone listed as drive D: or drive E:

Are you downloading it fresh from their site for each machine you're trying to load it on? If you keep trying to install from the same copy, perhaps there's something wrong with that copy.

Yip, I download it from them.
After installing the box to run the application is ticked. and a screen comes up asking you to register in 15 days. I see there's also an icon in the system tray. when the app crashes that icon disappears.
I'd really like to get it back - but it's not the end of the world - I'll just have to make another trip out to the lion park and be brave again :)
Steven

Poor audio quality is one of the top reasons people don’t use video conferencing. Get the crispest, clearest audio powered by Dolby Voice in every meeting. Highfive and Dolby Voice deliver the best video conferencing and audio experience for every meeting and every room.

Johannesburg is a little outside my service area, sorry. And I would've let you attach it to my system, and then use the system to get the picture back yourself...

I wonder if the iphonedisk software's problem is that it isn't compatible with a South African installation of Windows? (That is, with Zimbabwean English or whatever set as the regional setting; please excuse my ignorance.)

I wonder whether it might work if, as an experiment, you went into Control Panel, and set Regional and Language Options, just temporarily, to "English (United States)," assuming that's not how it's set now ?

Featured Post

Manage projects of all sizes how you want. Great for personal to-do lists, project milestones, team priorities and launch plans.
- Combine task lists, docs, spreadsheets, and chat in one
- View and edit from mobile/offline
- Cut down on emails

From Coral's "So You Want To Play With Computers" Series
Preface:
What follows is a tweaked reprint from 2005/06. This is a True Story. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. While this deals with a fairly simple, text file recovery…

First I will try to share a design of a Veeam Backup Infrastructure without Direct NFS Access backup.
Note: Direct NFS Access backup transport mechanism is only available in Veeam v9
In above I try to design the Veeam Backup flow between i…

To efficiently enable the rotation of USB drives for backups, storage pools need to be created. This way no matter which USB drive is installed, the backups will successfully write without any administrative intervention.
Multiple USB devices need t…

This tutorial will walk an individual through the steps necessary to install and configure the Windows Server Backup Utility.
Directly connect an external storage device such as a USB drive, or CD\DVD burner:
If the device is a USB drive, ensure i…